As the sylvan sleuth comes to the Albert Hall, Jeremy Lloyd talks about
creating Captain Beaky.

In 1980 an odd slogan began appearing across Britain. “Hissing Sid is Innocent!” was printed on T-shirts and daubed across flyovers. It was seen as far afield as the Berlin Wall. Seeking to explain the phenomenon, the International Herald Tribune ran a front-page headline: “Beakymania Grips Britain”. The slogan referred to the villain of a charming comic song called Captain Beaky, in which a gung-ho but pea-brained bird led a gang of woodland chums through the countryside “righting wrongs” and battling an evil snake called Hissing Sid. Originally released in 1977, the song had been discovered by Radio 1 DJ Noel Edmonds and captured the public imagination.

Although since written off as a novelty song along with the album it came from, Beaky’s wit and grace has more in common with the earlier works of Tom Lehrer and Flanders and Swann, and the poems written by comedy writer Jeremy Lloyd had the timeless texture of fairy tales, packed with playful puns and underpinned with darkness and melancholy. They were set to weirdly evocative music by film and television composer Jim Parker. Crowning the combination were the vocal performances by Keith Michell, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Twiggy. It was turned into a BBC show, a musical, a pantomime and a ballet.

As a child, I was obsessed by Sellers’s quavering characterisation of Jacques, the penniless, drain-dwelling French mouse “in beret, boots and belted mac”, who causes an explosion when he lights up a cigarette.

It’s one of the first pieces I want to discuss with 81-year-old Lloyd when I meet him to discuss the Albert Hall’s one-night-only revival of the Captain Beaky songs next month, a festive show to raise funds for Unicef. Lloyd looks exactly as I’d imagined: a tall, old-fashioned gent in tweed jacket and cravat with a silver-topped cane in one hand and an eye glass dangling jauntily from his neck. He says he originally approached Charles Aznavour (best known for his tremulous 1974 hit She) to play Jacques, but the literal-minded gallic crooner failed to grasp Lloyd’s very English whimsy.

'We had a terribly funny conversation,” recalls Lloyd. He puts on precisely the kind of French accent you’d expect from one of the writers of ’Allo ’Allo! to re-enact Aznavour’s disdainful response to his pitch. “He said, 'Ah ahm a mooowse?’ I said, yes. Pause. He said, 'What is ee doingk in the drain?’ I said, he lives there. 'Ah see.’ Pause. 'And whyyyyyy am ah blewn up?’ Well, because you’ve lit a cigarette. And he said, 'Mice derrn’t smoke.’ Oh dear!”

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The son of an army colonel and a Tiller dancing girl, Lloyd says he’s enjoyed “a charmed life”. He was only 23 when he wrote his first movie, What a Whopper! (a 1961 caper about the Loch Ness Monster starring Adam Faith). A scroll through his extraordinary CV reveals that in addition to his celebrated sitcom work with David Croft (Are You Being Served?), he’s written for Goldie Hawn and Danny Kaye, appeared in two of the Beatles films, been engaged to Charlotte Rampling and (briefly) married to Joanna Lumley, who has remained a close friend and will be appearing in the Albert Hall show, reciting Dilys the Dachshund. Others who’ll be appearing include Vanessa Redgrave, Alan Titchmarsh, Roger Moore and Dragon’s Den’s Duncan Bannatyne.

Looking back, Lloyd feels that the Captain Beaky songs are “the best thing I’ve done. The most pure. These creatures just appeared in my head, ran down my arm and onto the paper. I think of them as a kind of magic-lantern show.” He’ll be performing the wonderfully woebegone Nearly Four, about a one-eyed bear abandoned at the dump, beside a broken clock eternally on the brink of a 4pm tea party. “The last time I did it,” he says, “there were tears in the front row. So we must pop a teddy under the piano so I can show the children he’s been rescued.”

The Wonderful World of Captain Beaky and his Band is at the Royal Albert Hall Dec 11. For tickets (£20-£60) call 020 7589 8212. All proceeds to Unicef